Partition external hard drive mac without losing data

#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data how to#
#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data mac os x#
#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data upgrade#

Once you transfer, you can sell the new drive (or if you have wiggly ethics, return it), or keep the upgraded drive and sell your old one after wiping it clean (triple pass erase and reformat). Personally, I'd go for the upgrade, unless I were broke. Or, a high capacity can be had for about 7-10c per GB (~$150-200 for a 2TB) with FW800/USB3. Costco was recently selling a 3 TB MyBook (USB2) for $100, though USB2 will be much slower and have less longevity, especially given Apple's new Thunderbolt standard.

#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data upgrade#

If you're in a position to buy, look for a great deal, or a nice upgrade to what you have (nothing in between). If you don't have room to make a second partition on the current drive to hold all the data, you will have to borrow, rent or buy another HD, and then set it to copy everything overnight or while you're at work.

And it must be journaled if you want a bootable partition.

#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data mac os x#

I'm guessing Mac OS X can mount a USB drive with or without an active partition?Д®DIT: I just did a little research that, although it does not give me a clear answer to my question, suggests that every HDD read by a Windows OS must have an active partition, even external ones.The OP has probably already solved this problem since posting 2 weeks ago, but for the record, smith is right, you will have to move the data one way or another to reformat to HFS+. If I were to do that, would it be better to set the HFS+ or the other FAT32 partition as active?Д«ut yes, I am sure that there are no boot files on any of the partitions, at least for Windows. all I can do is set another partition to be active.

I can't for the life of me figure out how it got set that way in the first place.ДЄs far as I know, there is no way to un-set the partition from being active through Disk Management. Lo and behold, I find out that one of the partitions is already set to active when I use Disk Management in Windows 7. well, the way I initially partitioned and formatted the drive was with Mac OS X's Disk Utility, which only permits the formatting of partitions in either NTFS or HFS(+). When I right-clicked and asked to Format that partition exclusively, I received the following message:Д¬lick to expand.Hmm. I have nothing important on the second FAT32 partition, but when I opened Disk Management in Administrative Tools in Windows 7, I found that the second FAT32 partition is currently set as the active partition of that volume. (By the way, I have a Windows PC as well, which is why I would like to have NTFS partitions.) I have data on the first FAT32 partition that I would like to transfer to the second FAT32 partition once I have reformatted it as NTFS whereby I will then be able to reformat the first FAT32 partition to NTFS without losing my data.

#Partition external hard drive mac without losing data how to#

I learned how to enable Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's NTFS read-write capability today and so I no longer need to keep my first two partitions as FAT32 (especially since I have files larger than 4 GB I would like to store on them). I have a 1 TB external USB SimpleDrive hard drive that is currently partitioned into three partitions, two formatted with FAT32 and one formatted with HFS+ for Time Machine (Apple's backup software).

Just a quick rundown of what I'm trying to do here: